


Waking Nightmares

by Areiton



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Drinking to Cope, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Pining, Sheriff Stilinski is dead, Stiles Leaves, Tattooed Stiles Stilinski, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, companion story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 15:03:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11511834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: He thinks it might have taken a long time, but maybe that’s just the way it was always going to go. Maybe finding your way home is supposed to take a long time.Companion piece toThis Is Just A Dream





	Waking Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> While this story can stand on it's own, it's a companion piece to [This Is Just A Dream](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11234613), and fills in the 4.5 years Stiles spent away from Derek. Enjoy. <3

The day he left Beacon Hills, it rained. Derek watched in that quiet, sad way of his, the one that broke Stiles heart, but he didn’t say anything. 

From the first moment, when Stiles emerged from his bed to peer up at Derek, and tell him he was leaving--he’d never argued. 

Maybe because Derek had left so many times, he understood the need burning in Stiles’ blood, to get out, get away, he didn’t argue with it. 

It was on the tip of his tongue, to ask Derek to come. 

He thinks he would have--knows he would have--if he had asked. 

Derek hugs him, before he leaves, after he asks Stiles to stay, and Stiles can feel the wolf shaking--or maybe it’s him. 

 

~

 

He gets two miles out of town, and pulls his Jeep over and has his first panic attack since his father died. 

He’s hidden by the rain, in a world all it’s own in the Jeep, and if he stays there for an hour, gasping and screaming himself raw, no one knows it but him. 

 

~

 

He stops in Iowa, checks into a shitty motel in a no-name town. He means for it to be a night, a pit stop before he keeps going, but one night turns into a week and then two. Some days he pulls himself out of bed, but most days he sleeps away, shaking out of nightmares full of blood and claws. 

He picks up his phone to call Derek roughly thirty times a day, until he decides the best option is to destroy the damn thing. 

 

~ 

 

When he finally emerges from the hotel, he barely recognizes the haunted eyes and scruffy beard, the dirty hair and pale thin face staring back at him. 

He wonders if Derek would. If his father would. 

It's almost enough to send him back to his knees, the idea that he is losing the person they knew and loved. So he locks the thought away, where he can't think about it anymore and he drives until the road blurs. 

 

~ 

 

He hasn't seen Lydia in over a year. She fled Beacon Hills six months before graduation, after a stint in Eichen House almost killed her and she never apologized for it. 

When he shows up at the door of her tiny apartment in Boston, she takes one look at him and promptly bursts into tears before dragging him inside and he lets himself breathe. 

 

~ 

 

It takes time for her to coax the story out of him. For the first time in his life, he isn't spilling over with words, desperate streams of chatter to fill the silences. He's silent, hollowed out by grief and loss. Lydia never listened to him, not in the years when it meant something and by the time she did, it had changed. 

_ He _ had changed. 

Scott was the one who got bitten, but Stiles--Stiles is the one whose life was unrecognizable now. The one who changed so much he can't recognize the eager, innocent boy who loved Lydia Martin. 

 

~ 

 

“What are you going to do, Stiles?” 

She's painting his toenails, and he's letting her because he’s too tired to protest and because with Lydia, his ability to say no has always been almost non-existent. 

He watches the way her lips tighten in concentration and the little pleased noise she makes when she finishes to her satisfaction. 

She turns her big green eyes on him, silently demanding. 

He shakes his head. “I don't know.” 

 

~

 

Once upon a time, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was Derek’s, and that made everything different--better and harder. It informed every choice. He'd be a deputy and an emissary and  _ Derek’s.  _ He belonged to Beacon Hills and the pack and that was enough, that was everything. He wanted that, blossomed within that view of his life. 

He remembers, vaguely, a life before Derek, before the bite, remembers dreams of chasing Lydia to college, of a life outside Beacon Hills even when he couldn't imagine a life without his father. 

And then one night changed it, changed everything. He was left in a world not outlined by his father and desperate to escape the small town and nightmare problems that killed him. 

But he didn't dream of a new life. 

When he dreamed at all, it was still of a life at Derek’s side. 

 

~ 

 

He wanders. 

Turns out there was a hefty insurance policy on the sherrif. Stiles didn't want to use it, until Lydia pointed out that it was use it or get a job and he knows he isn't ready for that.

For the first summer, he travels with Lydia, visiting Danny and even Jackson. He starts taking pictures then, with the little phone he picked up on the road.

In a world that feels distant and disconnected, the photos are  _ real _ and permanent. 

He's surprised to find he's good at it. 

 

~ 

 

He misses Derek. He isn't surprised by that, except when he is. Missing Derek is familiar and, strangely, comforting. He wonders sometimes what it says about him that he misses Derek more than his father. 

 

~ 

 

The first time he calls, he's drunk and alone, wandering through Quebec. He heard enough of a news story that it draws him, the familiar danger, and he watches them, the pack he recognizes easily. 

He wishes he could say he saw himself in the pack, but he can't. They're strange and other and assured in a way his werewolves never were, and it makes him ache with longing. 

He calls before he can convince himself he shouldn't. It's been seven months since he heard Derek’s voice and hearing it now, quiet and sleep rough, makes him stumble. He shoves a hand against his mouth, choking off his breath and his words, the whimper in his throat. 

“Stiles?” Derek asks, soft and hopeful and he sighs a little, when Stiles doesn’t respond. 

And then he talks, while Stiles leans against a building in a city a thousand miles away, and listens. 

 

~

 

It isn’t fair, what he’s doing. 

He knows that. And because he knows it, he doesn’t let himself do it often. 

But there are nights--when he is alone and the sky is bright and beautiful. When he is almost happy, when he can close his eyes and  _ feel _ Derek at his side--that he allows himself to be weak. When he calls, and lets the night spin out, Derek’s voice a low rumble in his ear, until it drifts out, soft, into the tiny snores he remembers from the blissful year they spent together. 

He listens until Derek is sleeping, and whispers into the night, “I still love you.” 

There’s never any answer. 

 

~ 

 

He drinks. 

He drinks a  _ lot. _ Enough that Lydia gives him worried eyes when he stumbles back to Boston, enough that Malia frowns and tells him he smells, when she visits. 

He takes a picture of her, framed against the harbor, a wild thing against the ocean and city and he sends it to Derek before he drags her out with him and proceeds to get ridiculously drunk. 

It’s easier to breath when he’s drunk, easier to forget the two gaping holes in his life when he’s drunk. 

He gets it, now, the way his dad drank after his mom died. He gets it and he’s ashamed because he knows how much his dad would hate seeing him like this. 

It doesn’t make him stop drinking, though. It just makes his stomach churn as he does. 

 

~ 

 

He doesn’t really mean to start dating. 

Lydia tells him to stop being an idiot, because drunk hookups in the back of a bar doesn’t constitute  _ dating _ . Which is fair--it doesn’t. 

But the bar hookups turn into one night stands turn into week long flings, until one day he looks up and realizes the same guy has been fucking him for a month--and the guy looks like Derek-lite, which shoves Stiles head first into a panic attack. 

They break up that day, and the next guy--he’s blond and lean, clean shaven and dark eyed, and Stiles doesn’t have any problem shoving him around in bed, very deliberately doesn’t miss the stubble burn on his thighs after they fuck. He doesn’t miss the cuddling either. 

He lets it go on for three weeks, before he moves on. 

Every guy is nice. One is actually a sarcastic bastard, and he only lasts a week before Stiles panics, and bolts, finding a girl with laughing blue eyes to hide with for two months. 

 

~ 

 

He doesn’t lie to himself. 

He might lie to the world, might lie to Lydia and Isaac and Scott, when he calls--but he doesn’t lie to himself. 

He’s hiding. 

From the aching loss, from the promise of more, from the fear and the nightmares and  _ life. _

He doesn’t even try to pretend it’s healthy. He knows he’s a spiral of self-destructive behavior.

He just can’t bring himself to stop spiraling. 

He can’t bring himself to care. 

 

~ 

 

Sometimes, he hears about home. 

About how his little town is faring. From all appearances, it's doing well. The threats stop coming so fast and furious, after the Dread Doctors, like the reputation of the pack was spreading and protecting them. 

Scott is happy, studying and shepherding the betas, and life is good. 

It still stings, when he hears about Derek. 

He tries to read what Scott doesn't say, but the picture that paints hurts so much he blocks it out and throws himself into a week long trip to New York, and long nights wandering and taking pictures that he can't help but send. 

 

~

 

The first anniversary of his father's death, he flies back to Beacon Hills. He doesn't tell anyone, not even Scott, but he walks through the preserve, huddled in the leather jacket he stole what feels like a lifetime ago. 

He can't find the tree where John died. He spends hours searching, circling closer to the Hale house before he forces himself away. 

He drives through the town, and he can see the beginning of changes, and it aches, the  _ want _ that takes him, the need to go  _ home.  _

He sees Derek leaving the station and he stifles a sob, hiding it behind his fist as he drives away because how. 

How could he do that, to Derek. How could him leaving break Derek so much? 

He wants to crawl back, and he wants to run away, and neither are really the right option. 

He gets on a plane and goes back to Lydia and the shell of a life he has on the east coast. 

 

~

 

He throws himself into another relationship that's over before it even begins, and let's it spin out for three months. 

Now, every time he wakes up gasping from the nightmares, it's Derek he sees. Derek, sad and hunched into himself, drawn and weary and broken in a way that not even Laura’s death had managed.

He calls Derek twice in that doomed relationship, and listens as Derek talks about books he’s read and the pack he left behind, about the weather and the full moon and the slow repairs to the Hale house. Until Derek murmurs, soft, “I still miss you.” 

Stiles is silent, and aching, his face wet when he finally hangs up. 

 

~

 

“Why are you still running?” 

He's a little surprised it's Jackson of all people to call him on his shitty behavior. 

“You had a good thing, Stilinski. You had two people who loved you enough to die for you. And you lost one and I won't pretend that isn't awful because it is. It fucking  _ sucks.  _ It isn't fair.” Jackson leans forward and stares at him. “But don't lose what's left because you're scared, man. You'll regret it for the rest of your life.” 

He doesn't look at Lydia when he speaks and Stiles doesn't ask why his voice rings with so much conviction. 

“What if I already broke it? What if I hurt him too badly to fix?”

Jackson shrugs and now his gaze does flick to Lydia. “Fix yourself, Stiles. Then fix what you broke.”

 

~

 

He doesn’t know what he wants. 

No. That’s not true. He knows what he wants. It’s the same thing he’s wanted since he was sixteen and chasing Scott through the Preserve. 

The thing he had, for a year, before it all came tumbling down. 

 

~

 

So much of his life feels vague. Like a dream he’s drifting through, and sometimes, he wonders if his memories of Derek are  _ memories _ or a waking nightmare. Something he wanted so badly he created it, a fever dream. 

He knows he didn’t. But there are times, when he can’t tell. Times when the midnight calls and the pictures on his phone carefully saved under  _ Him _ are all that ground him to what he walked away from. 

It’s been over a year, closing in on two, when he goes to the tattoo parlor and walks out with a black triskle on the delicate skin of his wrist, the place that Derek always kissed and bit, when Stiles fucked him. 

Lydia eyes it, but doesn’t say anything. 

He enrolls in college a week later. 

 

~ 

 

“He misses you,” Scott says. 

He isn’t the only one who will talk about Derek, but he’s the only one besides Lydia who doesn’t bother pulling his punches. 

“I know,” Stiles stays.

“Then what the hell are you doing?” 

“Fixing myself,” Stiles says. 

There’s an explanation to that, burning behind his teeth, but he’s quiet, staring at his best friend, at his brother. 

He sees the anger and sadness that Scott isn’t voicing. It wasn’t only Derek that Stiles left, after all. 

“Do you care about him at all?” Scott demands, and he wonders when they changed--when the roles reversed. 

It used to be him protecting Derek from Scott. 

When did it become Scott protecting Derek from Stiles? 

“I never stopped loving him,” Stiles admits. “I have no fucking clue how to do that.” 

He doesn’t say that if he knew how, he would have stopped years ago. 

 

~ 

 

The problem is he doesn’t know how to be happy anymore. 

He doesn’t know what he  _ wants _ . 

Lydia looks at him, as he struggles with a course catalog and huffs a sigh. “You keep trying to fit yourself into an ordinary life, Stiles.” 

He gives her a blank look and she shrugs. “You walked away from Beacon Hills. But the magic didn’t go out just because you left.” 

He rolls his eyes. “Not many classes for Emissary, Lyds.” 

“And there’s even less for Banshee,” she says, slapping her magazine shut and standing. “But I know some people.” 

“You--you left that behind.” Stiles protests. “It almost killed you, you said you couldn’t do it anymore.” 

“Stiles, it’s part of who we are. We can leave the place, but we can’t ignore who we are.” She says, almost pityingly. 

 

~

 

He still has nightmares. 

He still misses what he walked away from. 

But the times slips by and he puts the shattered pieces of his life back together and he allows himself to hope. 

When he listens to Derek’s voice on the phone, when he dreams of them and his father, when magic spools in his fingertips like a promise--

He allows himself to hope. 

 

~

 

The day he leaves Boston, Lydia kisses him and smiles and leans back into Jackson like she’s found where she belongs, and he thinks it might have taken a long time, but maybe that’s just the way it was always going to go. Maybe finding your way home is supposed to take a long time. 

It takes him four days, and only because Scott gets his mom on the phone and she bitches until he agrees to rest, to drive across the country. 

Leaves are falling, and it’s fall, and that’s always felt like a new beginning, to him. A time to let go and a time to start again. 

There are leaves falling, when he leans against his Jeep and waits for Derek to come out of the house where they had been happy and his heart stops, when he sees the disbelief and hope in those beautiful eyes. 

He had backed off, given Derek space and time--quit calling and texting pictures because he knew it wasn’t fair to keep that foothold when he was the one who walked away. 

But as Derek approaches him slowly, carefully and everything  he wants to say, all the words he’s bottled up for over four years are choked in his throat, and it’s almost  _ funny _ that it’s Derek who speaks first, who demands, “Are you here to stay?” 

He smiles. 

 

~

 

Later, in the quiet of Derek’s bed, while the familiar and comforting weight of him presses Stiles down, as he moves with a lazy desperation, their fingers tangled together, Stiles whispers into the pillow, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” a pleading litany as Derek fucks him and he can feel the nightmare he’s been living for years breaking apart. 

 

~ 

 

Derek kisses the tattoo on his wrist, and watches him with big, patient eyes, and Stiles opens his mouth and says, 

_ I love you _

Derek’s eyes brighten and he tugs Stiles close as Stiles begins to talk, the steady chatter that has always been the soundtrack of their lives, and he closes his eyes as Derek burrows into his neck and Stiles’s tugs him closer, and holds on tight. 


End file.
